Tuvalu’s surprise efforts to open a discussion of their proposed amendment to the Kyoto Protocol (see earlier posts here and here), and the subsequent suspension of negotiations this past Wednesday, continued to generate buzz today at COP as the country parties, NGOs, and the media attempted to gauge the possible fallout. Environmental NGOs were crowing with praise: Climate Action Network and Avaaz.org awarded Tuvalu a “Ray of the Day” award for taking a firm stand for stringent, legally binding commitments. The media have been reaching for all possible witticisms alluding to the country’s minute size and…

We spent much of today making sense of the reverberations emanating from Tuvalu’s controversial proposal yesterday and the subsequent stalling of the negotiations. We were able to glean some updates through the plenary sessions, press briefings, and our own interpretation of the texts in contention…(Somehow, people have started approaching us…

Our group, the Biodiversity Pod, has been tracing the inclusion of wetlands and peatlands protection in the climate negotiations throughout the semester. Our primary stakeholders have been ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and Wetlands International. Last night, Wetlands International held a side event on peatland conservation and the importance of these areas for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

The event attracted a fair number of people from a variety of NGO’s and a few country delegations. Presentations by Wetlands International scientists were interesting and informative, especially for providing a background on the effect of peatlands on carbon sequestration. The most notable aspect of the event was the presence of a representative from Indonesia.

Indonesia, the highest emitter of carbon dioxide from peatland degradation, was represented by a…

I attended a side event sponsored by IETA, the International Emissions Trading Association.This is a trade group of the financial institutions involved in trading allowances and in financing carbon offset projects.In a way, collectively, their members are the “carbon market”.I thought this summary might interest those who are following the development of US Cap and Trade programs, and who look to the price of carbon in these markets as a major factor in developing RED and other forest-based offset projects.This panel was moderated by John Scowcroft, or Eurelectric, a trade group of the electric utility industry.

This session focused on understanding how the rules and market forces will…

During one of yesterday’s side events, a woman sat on the floor with a baby on her lap. The baby occasionally giggled loudly, dropped her bottle, and a few times started crying, which was pretty distracting for those of us on that side of the room. Initially I was annoyed that someone would bring a toddler to a climate conference and allow it to disrupt the meeting. But when I gave it some more thought, I realized that she served as an important reminder of the future generations who don’t have a say in this conference, but who will likely spend more time on a climate-changed Earth than I will.

Christopher Monckton, the well-known British climate change denier, was spotted near the Yale booth around lunchtime today. When I saw him, he was the focus of a gleeful swarm of youth activists. While Monckton engaged in heated debate with a handful of energetic young people, a couple of daring souls found a different way to get the last word. Monckton walked away sporting stickers that read “I love climate change” and “350 ppm” on his back.

Lord Monckton gets tagged

Follow up on 12/12: Read more about Lord Monckton’s confrontation with youth activists on The Lede blog at the New York Times…

By Angel Hsu and Christopher Kieran
Another post by ‘Team China.’ These posts are originally being featured on Green Leap Forward and also cross-posted on Climateprogress.org and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy’s blog.
While the drama surrounding the Guardian’s leak of a “secret” Danish negotiating text seems to be fizzling down (see our previous post), this was most likely due in some part to a small island nation now famous here in Copenhagen. Yes, you guessed it – Tuvalu, a tiny Polynesian island occupying just 10 square miles of the Pacific Ocean.
During the morning plenary session today, however, the Tuvaluans were not as diminutive as the size of their small island state would suggest. After Tuvalou proposed the creation of a contact group for a ‘Copenhagen Protocol’ (full text of draft here), China’s apparent negative reactions sent the Tuvaluans to motion for a suspension of the talks. The proposed ‘Copenhagen Protocol’ would parallel the current negotiations regarding the Kyoto Protocol (KP). It would be stricter than Kyoto, and legally bind parties to keep global atmospheric CO2 concentrations to 350 parts per million and global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

By Angel Hsu and Christopher Kieran
A group of Yale Forestry and Environmental Studies graduate students are following the Chinese negotiations team over the two weeks. These posts are originally being featured on Green Leap Forward and also cross-posted on Climateprogress.org and the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy’s blog.
The China Information and Communication Center （中国新闻与交流中心） held an unpublicized press briefing featuring Su Wei (pictured center of panel), China’s lead negotiator and Director-General of the NDRC’s Department of Climate Change. While mainly consisting of reporters, the event was open to anyone – well, just about any one of 50 people with their ear to the ground who managed to squeeze in early before crowds more were turned away. We were two of the lucky few who successfully navigated to the quiet back corner of the Bella Center, near the Chinese delegation’s offices, where the briefing took place. The briefing also came after China and the G-77 delegations canceled their press conferences this afternoon, only to restage them later in the day, supposedly in response to some controversy over leaked Danish draft text. But more on this later.

Angel Hsu is a Doctoral Student at Yale University, focusing on Chinese environmental performance measurement, policy and governance. Prior to Yale, she worked in the Climate Change and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental think-tank. There,she managed the GHG Protocol’s projects in China, which focused on capacity-building on greenhouse gas accounting and reporting standards for Chinese government and businesses…